When will I become obsolete?

Sitting here in my office, I’m surrounded by obsolescence.

Over on the desk to my right is an electric pencil sharpener. I haven’t used a pencil in at least 20 years, and the one I used then probably doesn’t need sharpening.

On my left under the TV is a combo DVD/VHS cassette player. We have at least five video cassette recorders in the house, dating back to the 1990s when my wife and I both worked and we recorded a lot of TV shows. I mean a lot of TV shows. We had VCRs running all day and night all over the house with tapes labeled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., so we didn’t miss any must-see TV.

How many people do you know who still have a VCR? Did you even remember that it was called a video cassette recorder? Can you believe I once had both Beta and VHS?  

Behind me on a bookcase is an iPod. My wife has one, too. I loaded mine up with playlists and listened to it every day when I took my three-mile walks. Hasn’t been turned on for, I dunno, five years, since I got my iPhone and realized I could put the songs right on there and carry one device instead of two. I assume the iPod battery has gone dead by now – just like my battery has. I no longer walk three miles a day. Or week. Or month...

In the closet is a camera bag filled with equipment, including a Nikkormat 35-mm camera with wide-angle and telephoto lenses, a flash attachment and film; a Sony video camera that we got for Christmas in 1996 with extra batteries and tapes; an instant camera that’s older than my children; and other stuff as well. I got it out yesterday looking for something and choked on the inch-deep layer of dust that covered the bag.

Also in the closet is a very nice Sony 6.0 megapixel digital camera I bought my wife several years ago because she’s very good at photography. She still takes a lot of photos, but now she mostly uses her phone.

Elsewhere in my office there’s a boom box. We have at least two of those, plus a number of portable cassette and CD players. I use the boom box once in a while to listen to sporting events, even though you can now “listen live” on radio stations’ web sites. It also plays CDs, but hasn’t sniffed one since about the year 2000.

Above that on a stand I have a printer that includes a fax machine. I’ll just leave that here.

I have two “picture tube” type TV sets that weigh about a thousand pounds apiece and are at least a foot and a half deep, made obsolete by bigger, lighter, sharper flat screens that we have in almost every room of the house. I could throw the old ones away, but they both still work fine. They’re hiding somewhere in my basement.

I have a box full of really nice corded telephones that became obsolete when I bought a set of six cordless ones. Even those would be considered dinosaurs by people who now use a cell phone exclusively.

I have books. Actual books. Shelves lined with them, boxes full of them and stacks of them on the floor. I keep them (and still buy them) even though I have another 300 or more in my three Kindles. There’s something about an actual book full of pages that I like having around me. I like the look, the feel and the smell of real books. My Kindles don’t smell like anything.   

I have a battery-powered portable DVD player that my wife bought me for Christmas. I used to take it outside in the summer. It was a great thing to have until we started watching Netflix movies on our Kindles, our iPad and our phones. Then it was good-bye portable DVD player… back into the closet with the cameras.

And then there is the music.     

I have always loved music, dating back before I started school when my mother used to play Elvis records and my dad walked around singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” To feed my passion for song, I started buying 45-rpm vinyl records as soon as I had some money in the 1960s. They grew into long-playing records called “albums” when I could scrounge up $5 to buy one.

Over the years, I collected somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 vinyl records, some of which were played so many times the black grooves turned white and the scratches became louder than the lyrics. For records, one needed a turntable. Mine all wore out, but I was lucky to find one on sale at Sound Investments several years ago. It’s a Sony and I think I bought it for, like, $50.

Now, even Sound Investments is obsolete.

In college, like everyone else, I had to hang a wobbly 8-track tape player under the dashboard of my car. Why wait for that one song on the radio when you could plug in your own music and take it on the road? Of course, the tape in an 8-track tape was designed to play over and over itself until two or more songs started bleeding together. That’s when you jammed a matchbook under the tape to raise it up slightly and override the second song.

Eventually, the tape just wore out altogether. If there ever was a failed technology worse than the 8-track tape, I don’t know what it was. The typical 8-track tape cost around $8-10 as I recall, and lasted a month if you were lucky. Eventually, they were replaced by cassette tapes which at least ran for 30 to 60 minutes before flipping over and reversing direction. I have a few hundred of those, too, and most of them are still in good condition. That required the addition of a cassette player or two – and one in each car.

Cassette tapes made it possible to buy new, replacement versions of those scratchy, overplayed vinyl albums, play them one time only while simultaneously recording them onto cassette tape and then put them away, never to be played again unless the tape got damaged or lost. I did a fair amount of that, until, alas, the compact disc came along.

Compact discs. CDs for short. Shiny metal discs that required yet another playback device. The great thing about CDs is that nothing actually touches the playing surface except a laser light so they never wear out or become unplayable – unless you step on them, break them, get enough fingerprints on them to solve crimes, leave them in the sun too long or let small children handle them after making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  

Across the hall from me right now are bookcases full of a few hundred CDs and DVD movies, even though I can’t remember the last time I bought either one. You don’t buy music or movies any more, you download them, which leaves you with a whole lot of records, tapes, discs and electronic equipment that is virtually obsolete.

There’s other stuff, too, that has passed its time. I could mention watches (I have three but don’t wear any), alarm clocks, boxes full of clothing, old computer games, backup discs from days when I worked and the floor-mounted Dell PC tower that still uses Windows XP.

And did I mention my cars? One of them is 15 years old and the other will turn 20 next fall.

So as I said, I’m surrounded by obsolescence, and a lot of it is right here in this office where I sit typing this essay. The only question now is, when will I become obsolete? It could be any day now, I suppose. If I stop writing the shieldWALL, I guess you’ll know.